Quick note: As you've noticed, this blog has been dry as the Sahara Desert for the past 5-6 months. That's because I have been busy attending Graduate School to get my Master's Degree. It was a last-minute decision I ended up making to better my life overall and my hopes are that it will all be worth it. I will try to keep writing for this blog, but Graduate School is a ton of work so I can't promise anything. Know that I still love writing for this blog and want to continue this work for as long as I can.
Pinocchio is one of those tales as old as time. A fairytale about a young wooden boy who is magically brought to life with the desire to become a real boy is one that has been adapted many times throughout film and TV history. The story, originally written by Carlo Collodi in 1883, became popularized by Disney’s first animated adaption in 1940. The film received critical acclaim and became a Disney classic. Now in 2022, we have had 3 total adaptions: one directed by Robert Zemeckis and another live-action version by Disney, both of which were received poorly. Finally, we had Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro’s (Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape of Water) and co-director Mark Gustafson's stop-motion animated adaption of Pinocchio. I had the pleasure of watching this film over the weekend after it was finally released for streaming on Netflix and it is one of the best adaptions of the story I have seen.
Instead of the 1800s, del Toro’s version takes place in 1930s Italy when Mussolini and fascism ruled, and Europe was in a great war. It follows the story of an old wood maker named Geppetto (David Bradley) who loses his beloved son, Carlo (Gregory Mann), to the war and creates a wooden boy in a drunken stupor to try to bring Carlo back. The wooden boy, AKA Pinocchio (also voiced by Mann), and his guide Sebastian J. Cricket (Ewan McGregor) are visited by a Wood Sprite (Tilda Swinton) who brings Pinocchio to life and brings joy back to Geppetto’s life. What follows is a story that teaches Pinocchio and the viewer the values of life and how much we need to cherish it.
The story itself is much darker than I expected it to be. I feel like it verges on being PG-13 if del Toro and his team didn’t pull back to keep that PG rating for kids. I don’t think this will scar kids for the rest of their lives, but there are some haunting scenes and themes that might give them a bit of a fright. The theme of anti-fascism and anti-war are in the film and del Toro is not afraid to tell these messages to his audience. I think adults watching this will understand the messages that del Toro is trying to tell which makes sense since he has repeatedly advocated for the fact that animated movies like this one are for everyone, not just children (an ideal that I wholeheartedly agree with).
The animation itself is an achievement in its own right. Stop-motion animation is one of the hardest mediums to work with mainly because everything is done by hand. While this can be said for almost any kind of film both animated and live-action, stop-motion is literally crafted by hand from the small sets, the character models, and especially the movements of every character which can take months just to get a few seconds of the film completed. A puppeteer working on stop-motion must move the character model’s centimeter by centimeter for every single frame from their walking cycle to the movement of their mouths when they talk. It is an incredibly tedious and long task because everything is physically there for someone to interact with, unlike computer animation where everything takes place digitally. I watched the behind-the-scenes special after I finished watching Pinocchio and it dives into how much love and hard work went into every second of production. It is honestly astounding to see how these films are crafted.
The designs of the characters also need to be praised. These are some of the most authentic designs I have ever seen. Every detail in every character is crafted and painted with love and care that can be seen on screen. You can see the dirt and bags under Geppetto’s nails and hair; you can see the wood carvings, nails, and twigs all over Pinocchio’s body, there are rabbits in the underworld that are designed as if they are half bones, and you can tell that both the Wood Sprite and Death are based on biblically accurate depictions of angels with their mysterious figures and eyes on their wings. I especially love how Pinocchio is designed here as he is not the perfectly crafted creature that we have seen in other adaptions. Remember that Geppetto made Pinocchio in a drunken rage, so Pinocchio would turn out imperfect. There is no way a drunk man could craft a boy as finely as the one seen in Disney’s version, especially with clothes. Del Toro’s Pinocchio is practically naked and as raw as a boy carved drunkenly overnight could look like. Despite his Frankenstein’s Monstery appearance, he still comes off as the sweetest, naïve boy you could meet.
The characters themselves are as enduring as one could make them out to be. As I said, Pinocchio is a charming young lad who is constantly curious about this unknown world he was born into only a few days ago. He’s got the personality of a 5-year-old who has the sweetest personality while still wholly unaware of the stark reality of the world around him such as war and far-right fascism. All he wants to do is make his Papa, Geppetto, happy. Mann’s performance gives Pinocchio a personality that manages to be adorable without being annoying. His singing voice is also superb and I wish I could hear more. Geppetto is probably the most grounded character whom you can’t help but feel bad for after he loses Carlo. Geppetto is freaked out by Pinocchio when they first meet (and who wouldn’t be), but he does learn to eventually love his new son and raise him as his own. Cricket becomes Pinocchio’s moral compass throughout the film trying to teach Pinocchio what some of these foreign human feelings are and what it is like to be human overall (kind of ironic since he's, well, a cricket). McGregor plays an incredibly endearing Cricket, though he is the main source of comedy in the film as he keeps getting crushed over and over again in funny ways and somehow keeps surviving these incidents (in the original story, Cricket gets accidentally killed by Pinocchio throwing a hammer at him which is referenced at one point). He also tries to get his own song in but keeps getting interrupted by something or someone. Thankfully we get to hear McGregor flex his pipes near the end of the film, so wait for that. Finn Wolfhard plays Candlewick, a young boy parallel to Pinocchio who is trying to live up to his fascist father’s (voiced by Ron Pearlman) expectations despite being afraid of him. He comes off as a bit of a bully at the beginning, but as he gets to know Pinocchio, he learns that maybe constantly following orders isn’t always a good thing. He becomes a character whom I ended up caring about and wanting to live a good life. There are also other characters like Count Volpe (voiced by Christophe Waltz) and the monkey, Spatzatura, (voiced by Cate Blanchet which was a shock to learn) who also lead Pinocchio on his journey and they are both great as well.
I mentioned before that Pinocchio and Cricket both sing in this film and that is because this film does contain musical numbers. I wouldn’t call it a musical though; more like a film that has musical numbers in it. All the songs are wonderful to listen to and the character’s VAs really get to flex their singing pipes, especially Pinocchio’s. “My Son” sung by Geppetto at the beginning is a bittersweet song dedicated to his love for Carlo (and becomes the leitmotif for the rest of the film), “Everything is New to Me” is Pinocchio’s introduction song showing how sweet yet chaotic and naïve he is due to the fact that he was literally born overnight and doesn’t know how the world works just yet, “Ciao Papa” is a beautiful song that Pinocchio sings when he goes off on his own for a bit, etc. These songs last for the first 2/3rds of the movie until it stops once Pinocchio is put into military boot camp where the story takes a darker turn. There is one more song sung by Cricket at the very end and it’s a nice way to cap off the film. They’re not going on my playlist anytime soon, but they are very good broadway-esque songs that help drive the story to where it needs to go.
Now I want to talk about the main man behind the project, Guillermo del Toro. There are a lot of directors in the entertainment industry whom I like and respect, but del Toro is one of the first names I point to when asked about them. I greatly love and respect this man and his creative mind. Like del Toro, I am a massive fan of fiction. Things like sci-fi and fantasy particularly catch my eye. For me, there is something magical about reading or watching something otherworldly come to life. These things can only truly exist in our imagination, but filmmakers like del Toro will put their hearts into projects that can make these fantasies as real as possible. I think one of the best well-known examples of this is Peter Jackson’s original Lord of The Rings trilogy and George Lucas’ Star Wars series. The way that Jackson brought the world of J.R.R Tolkien’s book to life was groundbreaking for fantasy stories in particular. The film was everything that made Middle Earth magical. From the set design, the special effects, the character models like Saron and Gollum, the beautiful musical score by Howard Shore, and of course the direction from Peter Jackson. These all came together to create a classic that ended up being nominated and winning several Academy Awards, a rarity for sci-fi/fantasy outside of the animation category. The same can be said for the Star Wars series. Lucas created an ever-expansive world in a galaxy far, far away. The concepts of Jedis, lightsabers, X-Wings, etc. were popularized by this very series. The series rocketed Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford’s careers to fame. It is also hard to hear Darth Vader’s voice without thinking of James Earl Jones’ iconic vibrato (that and his role as Mufasa in The Lion King). Sci-fi as a genre was changed forever thanks to Lucas’ influence and it continues to have massive impacts on pop culture today in 2022.
Unlike Jackson and Lucas, del Toro has not usually stuck with one particular franchise on which to base his movies. With the Hellboy and Pacific Rim films being exceptions, Guillermo del Toro is more known for his solo fantasy/sci-fi movies. One of the best examples comes from del Toro’s film, Pan's Labyrinth, which gave him international recognition. The film takes place in the Spanish War and is about a young girl who discovers this mystical world full of fairies and monsters to discover her origins and a way to save her mother. It is a fantastic film filmed with original monster designs based loosely on real mythology. One of them is the Pale Man with eyes on his hands and eats fairies that the main character has to face in the middle of the film. There’s something so unsettling about this design that it freaks viewers out the minute they see it. There is also the Amphibian Man in the Oscar Winning film, The Shape of Water, that Sally Hawkins’ character falls in love. It’s not nearly as creepy as creatures in Pan’s Labyrinth, but instead has this design that leaves you interested in it, what it really is, and where it came from. Guillermo del Toro is the only director out there whom I can think of who is not afraid to express his creative love for sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and comics, even anime for the sole purpose of creating works of art.
Other directors try to take this route as well, but del Toro is one who reminds me that films are magical. They are filled with wonder and enjoyment that can’t be expressed well in other mediums. When I was watching Pinocchio I was constantly in awe of how the animation moved so seamlessly to the point where I constantly wondered how in the world is this stop-motion. The way the characters were modeled and created both literally and figuratively made them just as real as any other live-action character I have seen. The fairies brought me back to some of del Toro’s prior creatures such as the biblical angel in Hellboy 2 where the eyes were located in its wings instead of its face and it felt completely otherworldly. And the story itself moved me in a way that I do not many others do. The ending especially hit me like a ton of bricks because I didn’t think that they would end Pinocchio like that. It wasn’t a bad ending by any means, but it broke my heart in the most beautiful way. It drove the theme of life and death home. We must cherish our time with ourselves, each other, and the world around us. That statement can be hard to say sometimes with the world seemingly getting worse and worse, but there is still beauty in it and I believe that we should enjoy it to the best of our abilities.
Happy 2023, everyone!
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